“Ten Mistakes” (as I shall now call it because I’m too lazy to keep
typing the whole title), was a talk by Roy Osherove which I went to at
Skills Matter. He basically takes us through ten common mistakes he sees
team leaders make, and offers some solutions to them. He also looks
like Adam Sandler, I kid you not.

Adam Sandler

Here’s Adam, doing some funny acting, or something.

Roy Osherove

Here’s Roy delivering a piece to camera…

Adam Roy started us off by talking about a number of questions that team leaders might have. These included such things as:

How do I convince my team to do X

What do I do with the bad apple in my team?

What am I supposed to do as a team lead?

Why can’t we get away from fighting fires?

Will I lose friends?

He said that these were all questions that haunted him for years, and
in the rest of the talk he goes on to explain how to answer them. He is
also in the process of writing a book called “Notes to a Software Team
Leader” which also covers these points.

So, we then moved on to the first of the Ten Mistakes…

#1 Not Recognising Team Maturity

This was a good place to start because much of the talk referred back
to the “maturity level” of the team. Roy says that there are 3 levels
of maturity when it comes to describing agile teams. These are:

Chaos

Learning

Self-Leading

Chaos

A chaos team is one where people are always too busy. Maybe they’re
always firefighting or they’re just being asked to too much in too
little time, either
way, the result is the same – chaos. Nobody has any time to get
organised and nobody has any time to learn anything new because they’re
just too busy for that. This is obviously not a great maturity level to
be at if you ask me, because eventually people will suffer burn out or
get frustrated at the lack of opportunities to learn, and eventually the
good guys will leave. However, Roy says that the chaos level is
actually exceedingly common, and I can easily believe him. The trick is
to act in an appropriate way if you’re the leader of a chaos team. A
chaos team leader needs to be assertive and strong in their actions.

When the ship is sinking, you need a leader to give orders, not call a meeting

A chaos team leader will often need to take a stand and maybe tell
management that the team cannot do everything that they’re being asked
to do. It’s a tough role, it requires you to make tough decisions with
conviction.

Management done right is a really tough job

So why, as a team leader, do you have to make all of these tough
decisions yourself, instead of discussing them with your team? Well the
simple answer is that there just isn’t enough time for meetings. by
making these executive decisions yourself, you’re giving your team some
breathing space, or simply just the space they need to get their work
done. Sure, you might make a few wrong decisions, life’s tough, but it’s
for the greater good because you’re giving your team the space they
need to grow into the next level, a Learning Team.

Learning

This level of maturity is one in which the team has a greater degree
of self organisation, but the team members still need to be coached. A
team leader will need to grow his/her team by constantly challenging and
questioning them, maybe even setting them homework! The goal with these
teams is to improve week-on-week, and to get the team members to start
solving their own problems.

So what are you going to do about it?

As a team leader of a Learning team you need to start to get your
team members to solve their own problems in order to grow into a
self-leading team. So if someone comes to you with a problem, encourage
them to think of ways to fix their issue, and empower them to do so by
responding with “so what are you going to do about it?”.

Self Leading

The third level of maturity is the self-leading team. This is where we
all want to be! In this team, the leader is more like a mentor – he
doesn’t tell people what to do or make executive decisions on behalf of
the team as he/she would in a chaos team. Even in a self leading team,
the team leader should still spend in excess of 50% of his time with his
team.

So, the first mistake in our list is to not recognise what maturity
level your team is at, and therefore not know how to lead your team in
the right way. If you run your team as if they were self-leading, but in
reality they’re chaos, then before long you’ll be heading up a certain
creek without a paddle.

#2 Fear of Delegation

If you’re used to taking things on and doing them yourself, then it
can be quite hard to feel comfortable delegating work to people,
especially if you have trouble relying on others to get the work done.

If everyone feels comfortable in what they’re doing, then you’re doing something wrong

When you delegate work, you’ll need to get used to asking other
people to take responsibility for something you’d otherwise do yourself.
This responsibility can take some people out of their comfort zone, and
this is a good thing. It’s important to challenge your team and get
them out of their comfort zone as it’ll help them grow.

#3 Fear of Engagement

This generally means not communicating effectively, but Roy breaks this down even further:

#4 Placating

“The Bus Factor” – what’s that? Well, the bus factor is the number of
people needed to get hit by a bus for the project to grind to a
standstill. It’s all about individuals holding lots of information. I’ve
seen this in a number of places, on good projects as well as bad, so I
think it’s fairly natural, but the point that Roy makes is that you
mustn’t placate these individuals just because they hold a lot of
crucial knowledge. A person with a bus factor of 1 (meaning they could
bring the project to a halt if they got hit by a bus) should be treated
just the same as anyone else. I love the idea of people having a bus
factor, just because it reminds me of the Kevin Bacon number.

#5 Being Irrelevant

I think this is about being in too many meetings and dealing with too
many emails etc and so on – basically not being there for the team,
losing contact with the real work, and generally being irrelevant.
Nothing to do with Kevin Bacon.

#6 Being Super-reasonable

Not sure I really agree with the terminology here but Roy says that
it’s super-reasonable to assume that everyone understands what your
talking about when in reality you might not be getting your point
across. I think the point to make here is that when you’re dealing with
groups of people, as in an agile team, it’s wrong to assume they all
have the same level of knowledge and understanding as yourself, and that
you should communicate with them in the best way suitable, which tends
to be by not making too many assumptions.

#7 Blaming

If you make your mind up that someone’s rubbish, then you will
consciously and subconsciously use this as an excuse to not engage that
individual. There will always be some people who are rubbish, but what
you need to do is work on their weaknesses and bring them up to the
level of the team, rather than to avoid engaging them, as this just
means you’ll constantly be carrying a dead weight.

#8 Ignoring Behaviour Forces

You must understand the forces that act on a person in order to
understand how they behave. There are 3 main types of forces that act on
a person:

Personal

Social

Environmental

All of these can affect a teams ability to be successful, and you
need to work out exactly what these forces are, and determine whether
they are affecting your teams ability. An example of an environmental
force is not having enough hardware to do what you need to do – for
instance, if you don’t have budget for a continuous integration server
then it’s going to be almost impossible to be agile.

#9 Fear of Assertiveness

Apparently this is common in the UK and in Norway, but not in
Denmark. Bet you didn’t know that. Well it’s true, allegedly. Anyway,
assertiveness is all about standing your ground and not living with
things that you feel aren’t acceptable. If your team is in chaos mode,
then you need to be especially assertive. A fear of being assertive can
be disastrous in a chaos team.

#10 Spreading Non-Commitment

This is about using vague language. Roy says that you should always
commit to deadlines, and when speaking to your team, make sure they tell
you when they will do something by. Apparently, just by making
the commitment in the words they use, they will be more motivated to
deliver on that commitment. Roy suggests that when you have a meeting,
end it by asking people what they’re actions are, and make sure they
answer in the form “I will do X by Y”. However, people should only
commit to doing things that are under their control, there’s no point
committing to doing something that you have to get someone else to do.
Also, as soon as you know that you’re unable to deliver on time, let the
team know and they might be able to help you out and maybe then you
will be able to deliver on time.

Questions and Answers

The Q&A went on for an age. I’ll summarise in bullet form, because bullet points are great!

You need to recognise when to change your leadership style – you
need to stop being a chaos team leader if the team moves on the being a
learning team

There’s no such thing as a chaotic learning team. The 2 cannot co-exist, however, teams can switch from one form to another.

Overseas teams don’t work as well as having everyone in-house. If you’re in this situation, you need to “change your reality”.

Agile teams should be 2 pizza teams – i.e. only as large as can be fed by 2 pizzas.

Good teams are grown, not hired

Scrum sometimes doesn’t fit teams in chaos mode

There’s no difference between a team leader and a manager if they’re the same person, which they can be.